Topology optimization for additive manufacturing with controllable support structure costs

Abstract

Advances in additive manufacturing (AM) allow economical production of components with unprecedented geometric complexity. This offers exciting opportunities for innovative designs, and particularly topology optimization has been identified as a key technique to fully exploit the capabilities of AM. However, also AM involves manufacturing restrictions, such as limitations on the inclination of overhanging parts. To deal with this problem, either sacrificial supporting structures can be added during the process, or only self-supporting designs can be considered. Both approaches have disadvantages, as support structures add material and post-processing costs, while demanding exclusively self-supporting designs may impose strong restrictions on achievable performance. With current methods, designers are limited to a choice between these two extremes. To open up a wider range of designs, this paper presents and demonstrates a topology optimization formulation that allows the designer to find trade-off solutions between design performance and support structure costs, considering both printing and removal costs.